WHEN François Durand makes Camembert on his 200-acre farm here, it is a bit like dancing.

Standing erect, he fixes his left arm securely behind his back. Then he bends and sways as his right hand quickly ladles just the right amount of warm, curdled raw milk from a huge vat into hundreds of small white plastic cylindrical molds.

The ritual must be repeated four more times in each mold before the cheese rounds are filled, ready for ripening, and five weeks later, ready for eating.

Mr. Durand is an icon in Camembert country. He claims to be the last dairy farmer in Normandy to be commercially making Camembert from hand-ladled unpasteurized milk.

Each of the 400 nine-and-a-half-ounce rounds that he produces every day is stamped with the seal of “Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée” or “AOC” — a coveted certification that authenticates the content, method and origin of production of a French agricultural item.

But Camembert purists like Mr. Durand are infuriated these days because two of France’s largest dairy producers want to change the rules.

Citing health concerns, the two companies, Lactalis and the Isigny Sainte-Mère cooperative, which together made 90 percent of the traditional raw milk Camembert in Normandy, began earlier this year to treat the milk used for most of those cheeses.

In doing so, they were forced to sacrifice their A.O.C. status, the first time in French history that Camembert producers voluntarily did so.

But they also have asked the French governmental food board to grant that status to their new Camemberts, arguing that the processing they use — either filtering or gently heating the milk — does not sacrifice the traditional taste and character of the cheese.

Mr. Durand and his supporters beg to differ, claiming that the move is a ploy by the dairy giants to make more cheese and profits while destroying a crucial part of French heritage. If the companies’ petition is granted, they argue, raw milk cheese would be threatened.

“Camembert that is not made with raw milk may be cheese, but it’s not real Camembert,” said Mr. Durand, who took over the family farm when he was only 19 and has run it for 26 years. “To not know a real raw milk Camembert — what a loss that would be. The variety, the diversity, the flavor of cheese — the very heritage of our country — will disappear.”

In New York, Steven Jenkins, a cheese expert and senior manager of the Fairway markets, praises the Lactalis Camembert made with treated milk, and sold at Fairway under the label Le Châtelain, as “something awfully darned good.”

But he laments the move away from raw milk. “This is a slippery slope that’s getting more slippery all the time,” he said. “Eventually everything’s going to taste the same — all because of profit.”

Raw-milk activists say the health issue is just a pretext for boosting production and pandering to the demands of large supermarket chains that want to avoid giving any impression that their food may be unsafe. And if the cheese is mass produced, with milk transported long distances and stored in tanks, some cheesemakers acknowledge, some treatment may be needed.

“Is driving a car dangerous?” asked Randolph Hodgson, owner of the London-based Neal’s Yard Dairy. “Is eating shellfish dangerous? Nothing is totally safe. It’s the large supermarket chains that require these things. It makes it easy for them to say, ‘It’s pasteurized so we’re off the hook if anything happens.’ ”

Feelings for the raw milk Camembert — with its supple crust and rich creamy ivory interior — run so strong that a group of retired cheesemakers and local businessmen has created the Committee for the Defense of Authentic Camembert, a tiny lobbying group. It has circulated a petition to protect the A.O.C. rules for Camembert “to guarantee its identity and maintain the diversity of tastes,” and for sanitary standards to be enforced.

Camembert is big business in France. According to the Maison du Lait, the French dairy industry’s federation, the country produced 112,000 tons last year. Most of it is mass produced, pasteurized and, according to Camembert purists, tasteless. Only about 12,000 tons, made with raw milk from Normandy, was awarded A.O.C. status.

It is also a product of myth and mystique. The cheese is said to have inspired the melting watches of Salvador Dalí’s painting “The Persistence of Memory.” The gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once penned a poem to the cheese that includes the lines, “Camembert, poetry, bouquet of our meal, what would become of life if you did not exist?”

The hilltop town of Camembert is little more than a City Hall, a 14th-century church and a tiny cheese museum supported by Lactalis.

Photo

GRASSY BOUQUET François Durand's raw milk cheeses.Credit
Ed Alcock for The New York Times

But pockets of tradition endure. At La Camembertière, a nearby restaurant, the owner and chef, Géry Boddaert, offers an entire menu with raw milk Camembert, including a Camembert tart, skate in Camembert sauce, entrecôte in Camembert sauce, free-range chicken in Camembert sauce, a green salad topped with melted Camembert and Camembert ice cream in apple syrup.

“There’s a completely different sensation with raw milk Camembert,” Mr. Boddaert said. “A different odor, a different taste, a different color. Industrial Camembert is a horror, a horror!”

Lactalis is using a “thermizing” process, a gentle form of pasteurization that heats the milk to between 104 and 161 degrees, a lower temperature than the norm for pasteurization. The thermizing removes potentially harmful bacteria, the company claims.

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The process is already used in some of the Camembert the company exports to the United States, where the Food and Drug Administration bans the sale or import of raw milk cheeses aged less than 60 days.

The much smaller Isigny Sainte-Mère, meanwhile, is using a “microfiltration” process that runs the milk through fine-mesh ceramic strainers and is used in making some yogurts.

The two cheese giants vigorously defend their decision to treat their Camembert milk, citing a case in December 2005, in which Réaux, a raw milk Camembert producer in western Normandy, was forced to close for several weeks when six children fell ill after eating Camembert made there.

“The small producers are claiming we want to kill them,” said Luc Morelon, the spokesman for Lactalis. “We don’t want to kill anybody. We just want to make our product safe. Even if the risk is small, it’s unacceptable for a company like ours to put consumers in danger and send children to the hospital.”

But in a strange bet-hedging twist, neither Lactalis nor Isigny Sainte-Mère has abandoned completely its production of raw milk Camembert. Lactalis is continuing to produce 850 tons a year of Camembert with raw milk at two factories in Normandy. The much-smaller Isigny Sainte-Mère is still making raw milk Camembert at one factory.

Mr. Morelon said the company’s remaining production of raw milk Camembert is safe because it is done on a small scale with tight controls.

Officials at two of the top cheese emporia in Paris, Quatrehomme and Barthélémy, said they will continue to sell only raw milk Camembert even though there is only a slight difference in taste between it and cheese made with milk that has been thermized or microfiltered.

“If the Camembert is from treated milk, I will warn all my customers — and I know my sales will go down,” said Nicole Barthélémy, owner of Barthélémy on the chic Rue de Grenelle in the seventh arrondissement.

Ms. Barthélémy points out that the main risk for cheese contamination has nothing to do with its production and everything to do with its storage.

“I tell my customers that the most important thing they can do for food safety is to clean their refrigerators,” she said.

Under current regulations, an A.O.C. Normandy Camembert must be made with unfiltered raw milk with a fat content of at least 38 percent produced in Normandy from cows that have been fed under strict conditions. The milk must be hand-ladled in at least four layers into molds of between 10 to 11 centimeters.

Lactalis and Isigny Sainte-Mère say that if they are able to get the National Institute for Origin and Quality, which administers A.O.C. status, to extend it to their new Camemberts it would not be unprecedented.

Thermized Pont-l’Évêque, Livarot and reblochon cheeses, for example, retained their A.O.C .status after the administrative agency ruled that raw milk was not crucial to retaining the authenticity of the taste.

Such a move, though, could spell financial disaster for small producers like Mr. Durand, who works 18-hour days and supplements his income by welcoming tourist groups.

Early one morning last week, 35 Polish tourists on a tour of France pulled up in a white bus — to watch his 60 cows graze on grass, listen to a filmed lecture on Camembert-making, sample big wedges of Camembert with bread and locally made apple cider and to buy cheese to take home.

In the small sales area and showroom at the farm, he and Gérard Roger-Gervais, the author of a book, with recipes, called “The Spirit of Camembert,” displayed what they call the perfect Camembert: aged so that the crust is slightly wrinkled and tinged with orange, with a texture that is neither too dry nor too gooey.

“Look at the cream, smell the odor,” said Mr. Roger-Gervais, who is also the founder of the Camembert defense association.

Holding up a crusty Camembert wedge, he exclaimed: “You can smell the farm, the grass, the cows. The richness comes in the originality, even in the imperfections. This is what we’re fighting to preserve.”

Correction: June 27, 2007

An article last Wednesday about French cheese makers who have stopped making Camembert with raw milk and have withdrawn from the government program that certifies that they use traditional methods misstated some of the standards for that certification, called an Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée. To have an A.O.C., a Camembert from Normandy must be made with unfiltered raw milk, and have a fat content of 38 percent. It is not the milk that has to have a fat content of 38 percent.

Maia de la Baume contributed reporting from Paris.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page F1 of the New York edition with the headline: If Rules Change, Will Camembert Stay the Same?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe